Travel Website of the Week: GlobeGenie

Sitting in a cubicle all day can be depressing, but one of the best cures is a bit of virtual sightseeing via the web. GlobeGenie can help you.

Often described as a mashup of Chat Roulette and Google Street View, GlobeGenie lets you look at random photos from the search engine’s mapping service.

You can select which continent or continents you want to explore, press the teleport button and in short order you get to look at a photo of a place you’ve probably never been. If you’re really feeling lazy, you can have a new photo automatically refreshed every 10 or 30 seconds.

To help you visualize what you’re looking at, there’s also a small map on the side that pinpoints the location you’ve landed on.

Because it is random, you never know what view you’re going to get. Some are mundane scenes while others are places of great beauty.

If you see a place that you think is particularly beautiful, you’re encouraged to share it with other visitors. If you don’t like too much randomness in your life, you can choose to browse that list of user favourites to quickly find exceptional sights.

Google Street View has mapped vast swaths of the planet, but it’s only a fraction of places on the globe. You’ll mostly see places on GlobeGenie in developed countries, so if you want to look at views of the Himalaya or Sahara Desert, you’re out of luck.